No Place Like Home

by Mary Higgins Clark

  Trying to recapture the warmth we had shared at the dinner table, I gave myself a mental shake, hoping to clear my head of all the darkness. Then I went into the kitchen. Alex had volunteered to clear the table and to put the dishes in the dishwasher, while I put Jack to bed.

  “Just in time,” he said with a smile. “Espresso’s ready. Let’s have it in the living room.” We sat opposite each other in the fireside chairs. By then, I had a feeling he was picking the right moment to bring up something. “What time did you tell Jack he has to turn out the light?” Alex asked.

  “Eight thirty. But you know the routine. He’ll be asleep before that.”

  “I’m still getting used to the way a kid begs for more time, then falls asleep the minute his head hits the pillow.” Then Alex looked at me, and I knew something was up. “Ceil, my piano is being delivered on Saturday,” he said.

  He raised a hand before I could protest. “Ceil, I miss having the piano. It’s been six months since I gave up my apartment and put it in storage. You may find a different house tomorrow, or it could be a year from tomorrow. Even if you do find one, the odds are that it’s not going to be available immediately.”

  “You want to stay here in this house, don’t you?” I asked.

  “Yes, I do, Ceil. I know that with your talent, if you decorated it, this would be a showplace, as well as a very comfortable home. We can put up a security fence to be sure we never have a vandalism episode again.”

  “But it will still be ‘Little Lizzie’s Place’ in people’s minds,” I protested.

  “Ceil, I know a way to put a stop to that. I’ve been going through some of the books written about the history of this area. A lot of the owners of the larger country homes used to name their houses. This house was originally called Knollcrest. Let’s call it that again, and have a sign made to put at the gate. Then, when we’re ready, we could have a cocktail party, have a picture of the house on the invitation, and welcome people to Knollcrest. I believe the name would begin to stick. How about it?”

  The look on my face must have conveyed my answer. “Well, never mind,” Alex said. “It was probably a lousy idea.” Then as he stood up, he added, “But I am going to have the piano delivered on Saturday.”

  * * *

  The next morning Alex gave me a hurried kiss on his way out. “I’m going for a ride. I’ll shower and dress at the club. I’ll call you tonight from Chicago.”

  I don’t know if he suspected that I had been awake most of the night. He came to bed about an hour after me, moving very quietly, assuming, I guess, that I was asleep, and settling on his side of the bed without even the perfunctory kiss that was becoming our nightly routine.

  After I dropped Jack at school, I went to the coffee shop again. Cynthia Granger, the woman who had chatted with me last week, was seated at a nearby table with another lady. When she saw me come in, she got up and asked me to join them. It wasn’t what I wanted to do, but I did instinctively like Cynthia, and thought that it might be a chance to get a sense of what the local people were saying about Georgette’s death—and the fact that I had been the one to find her body.

  After expressing concern for me at the shock I had experienced on Holland Road, Cynthia told me the general feeling in the community was that Ted Cartwright was involved in Georgette’s death.

  “Ted’s always been considered a Mafia-type,” Cynthia explained to me. “Not that I mean he’s in the Mafia, but with all his surface charm, you sense that underneath you’re dealing with one very tough cookie. I understand that somebody from the prosecutor’s office was in Ted’s office Friday afternoon.”

  For what turned out to be a very short interval, I felt as if everything might be all right. If the prosecutor thought Ted Cartwright was connected to Georgette’s death, I might have been wrong about Detective Walsh zeroing in on me. Maybe, after all, in their eyes I was only the victim of the vandalism, the lady from New York who had the incredibly bad luck to buy a stigmatized house and then to find a murder victim.

  Lee Woods, the woman seated with Cynthia, had moved to Mendham last year from Manhattan. It turned out that she had a friend, Jean Simons, whose apartment I had decorated before I married Larry, and she was effusive in her praise of it. “Then you’re Celia Kellogg,” she said. “I loved what you did for Jean, and she’s been loving it ever since. Talk about coincidence. I was redoing our apartment and asked her for your name. I called your number, but your assistant said that you recently had a baby and wouldn’t be taking on any new clients. Is that still true?”

  “It won’t be much longer,” I said. “Sooner or later, I do plan to hang out my shingle around here.”

  It felt so good to be Celia Kellogg, the interior designer, again. Cynthia and Lee even had a suggestion for a housekeeper whose longtime employer was moving to North Carolina. Gratefully, I took her name. But as we got up to leave, I had a sudden sense of being watched. I turned around and saw the man who was sitting at a nearby table.

  It was Detective Paul Walsh.

  40

  At three o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, feeling irritable and unsettled, Jeff MacKingsley told his secretary, Anna, to hold his calls. Paul Walsh had come back to the office at noon and reported that he had followed Celia Nolan around all morning. “I really jolted her when she saw me in the coffee shop,” he said. “And then I followed her over to Bedminster, where she went into that place where they sell riding clothes. She didn’t realize I’d followed her there. When she came out of the store with a bunch of boxes, I thought she’d have a heart attack on seeing me parked behind her. I knew she was picking up the kid, so I let it go for today. But tomorrow, I’ll be showing up in her space again.”

  He looked at me as if he’s defying me to take him off the case, Jeff thought, and I won’t do that, at least not yet. As far as I’m concerned, the investigations into Georgette Grove’s death and the vandalism on Old Mill Lane are going nowhere fast.

  Even the so-called “threat” Ted Cartwright had been heard to make to Georgette Grove in the Black Horse Tavern was more a response to her verbal attack on him than what most people would consider a warning of some kind. That doesn’t mean I think Cartwright is in the clear, though, Jeff thought. Far from it.

  He reached for his ever-present spiral notebook and turned to a fresh page. He always thought more clearly in the early stages of an investigation when he was sorting out the facts for himself.

  Who had a motive in killing Georgette? Two people, and Ted was one of them. Henry Paley was the other. Jeff wrote their names in the notebook and underlined them. Cartwright had been riding Wednesday morning and conceivably could have turned onto the trail that went through the woods behind the house on Holland Road. He could have been waiting for Georgette and followed her into the house. After all, she had left the door unlocked for Celia Nolan.

  The problem with that scenario, as Jeff saw it, was that one would have to assume that Cartwright knew that Georgette was showing the house that morning. Of course, his buddy Henry Paley could have tipped him off, but how could Cartwright be sure that Celia Nolan wouldn’t have driven over with Georgette instead of meeting her there? If Nolan and Grove had shown up together, would Ted Cartwright have killed both of them? Unlikely, Jeff decided.

  Henry Paley is the one who makes the most sense for both crimes, he thought, as he circled Henry’s name on his notepad. He admitted that he knew Georgette was scheduled to meet Nolan at the Holland Road house. He could have been waiting for Georgette to show up, then followed her in, killed her, and made his escape before Celia Nolan arrived. Money was his motive in wanting to kill Georgette, and another motive surely would be fear of disclosure. If she was able to tie him to the vandalism, he was facing a jail term, and he knew it.

  Henry is the one with motive and opportunity, Jeff concluded. Let’s say he had the Nolan house vandalized to embarrass Georgette, hoping the Nolans would sue her, which would have finished her financially. He was aware that she had failed
to apprise Celia Nolan of the stigma on the house. But then, when she saw that splash of red paint on the floor in the Holland Road house, she started asking questions. Jeff underlined Henry’s name again.

  Henry Paley admits to being in the vicinity of Holland Road on Thursday morning, he reflected. He was at a nine o’clock open house for realtors. The other realtors Angelo talked to remember seeing him there at about nine fifteen. Celia Nolan arrived at the Holland Road house at quarter of ten. That means Henry had somewhere between fifteen and twenty minutes to leave the open house, cut through those woods, shoot Georgette, go back to where he left his car, and take off.

  But if Henry is the killer, then who did he hire to vandalize the Nolan house? I don’t think he did it all by himself, Jeff thought. Those paint cans were heavy. The paint that was splashed on the house went higher than he could have thrown it. Also, there was nothing amateurish about the carving in the door.

  In Jeff’s opinion, the most puzzling unknown was the picture of Celia Nolan found in Georgette’s bag. What was the point of putting it there? Why had it been wiped clean of fingerprints? I could see where Georgette might have cut it out of the newspaper, he thought. Maybe she was beating up on herself because of the reaction Celia Nolan had to the vandalism. But Georgette certainly wouldn’t have wiped it clean of fingerprints. That was a deliberate act, done by someone else.

  What about the picture that Celia Nolan had found the day after the vandalism, the old one of the Barton family, the picture she was planning to hide? Granted she didn’t want any more publicity, but even so, she should have been worried at the possibility that some deranged person had been on their property. Or maybe she simply hadn’t thought it through. She’d found the picture only that morning, and her husband didn’t even know about it yet.

  Two pictures: one of the Barton family, one of Celia Nolan. One taped to a post in plain sight. The other deliberately cleaned of fingerprints—which anyone who ever watched a cops-and-robbers TV show would recognize as something investigators would consider significant.

  He looked down at his pad and realized the page was full of doodles, and that there were only three words on it: “Ted,”

  “Henry,” and “pictures.” The telephone rang. He had told Anna to hold calls unless they were urgent. He picked up the phone. “Yes, Anna.”

  “Sergeant Earley is on the phone. He says it’s very important. He sounds like the cat that swallowed the canary.”

  “Put him through.” Jeff heard a click and said, “Hello, Clyde, what’s up?”

  “Jeff, I got to thinking about who would be likely to do that job on Little Lizzie’s Place.”

  Does he expect me to play twenty questions? Jeff thought. “Get to the point, Clyde.”

  “I am getting to the point. And I thought, who besides the realtors could have had easy access to that red paint, you know, Benjamin Moore, red mixed with burnt umber?”

  He’s onto something, Jeff thought, but I’m not going to let him drag it out. He knew Clyde was waiting for him to get excited, but he said nothing.

  After a pause which did not get the reaction he had anticipated, Earley, his voice now crisper, continued: “I started to think about that landscaper, Charley Hatch. He had round-the-clock access to the Holland Road house. It was his job to keep the inside dusted and mopped up. He would have known about the paint cans being in the storage closet.”

  Jeff was no longer impatient with Clyde’s narrative. “Go on,” he said.

  “Anyhow, I had a little talk with him Friday afternoon, and when he let me in, I got the feeling that Charley was real nervous. Remember how hot it was Friday afternoon, Jeff?”

  “I remember. Why do you think Charley Hatch was nervous?”

  Now that he had the prosecutor’s attention, Sergeant Clyde Earley was not about to be rushed. “First thing I noticed was that Charley was wearing real heavy corduroy pants, and I thought that was peculiar. He was wearing what he would consider dress shoes, too, a pair of scuffed loafers. He tried to explain them away by saying that he’d just started to strip to shower, then saw me coming and grabbed the corduroys and stuck his feet in the loafers. Frankly, I didn’t buy it. I got real curious about where his regular work pants and shoes might be.”

  Jeff tightened his grip on the phone. The pants and shoes Hatch was wearing might have had paint stains, he thought.

  “So this morning I waited by Charley Hatch’s place until the guy who picks up the garbage came. I knew this would be the first collection since I visited him last Friday afternoon, and I thought that he might be just dumb enough to leave evidence like this in his own bin. The garbage truck finally showed up a half an hour ago. I waited for the guy to collect Charley’s garbage, and then I followed him till he was off Charley’s property. He was just about to throw the bags in the back of the truck. I think, as of then, we can consider the property to be legally abandoned. I asked the waste engineer, as he calls himself, to open Charley’s trash bags. He opened them, and lo and behold, in the second one beneath some old sweaters and sweatshirts, we found a pair of jeans with red spots, sneakers with red paint on the left foot, and nice little carved figures with the initials CH on the bottom. Apparently, Charley Hatch loves to do wood carvings. I’ve got all of these items in my office.”

  At the other end of the call, at his desk in the Mendham police station, Clyde Earley smiled to himself. He did not think it necessary to inform the prosecutor that, at 4:00 A.M. today, while it was still pitch dark outside, he had returned to Charley’s property and had put these items back into their original bag, with all of the old clothes that still sat in the bin awaiting today’s pickup. The plan had worked perfectly when he had retrieved the evidence in full view of a wonderfully reliable witness—Mr. Waste Engineer.

  “The garbageman witnessed you opening the bag, and he knew it came from Charley’s?” Jeff asked, his voice conveying the excitement Earley felt he deserved to hear.

  “Absolutely,” Clyde replied. “Like I said, he had carried the bags to the truck that was parked on the street, and it was right in front of Charley’s place. I also made it a point to specifically hold up a couple of the carvings so that he could see the CH initials on them.”

  “Clyde, as you know, this is a real breakthrough,” Jeff said. “That’s great police work. Where is Charley now?”

  “Out landscaping somewhere.”

  “We’ll send the clothes to the state lab, and I’m sure that they’ll match the paint on the clothes to the paint from the vandalism,” Jeff said. “But that could take a day or two, and I’m not going to wait. I think that we have enough probable cause. I’m going to file a complaint against him for criminal mischief, and we’ll pick him up. Clyde, I can’t thank you enough.”

  “My guess is that someone paid Charley to mess up the Old Mill Lane house, Jeff. He doesn’t come through as the kind of guy who would do something like that on his own.”

  “That’s my guess, too.” Jeff hung up the phone and went on the intercom. “Come in please, Anna. I’ve got a complaint to dictate.”

  She had barely settled in the chair across from his desk when the phone rang again. “Take a message,” Jeff said. “I want to get this arrest warrant out ASAP.”

  The call was from Clyde Earley. “We just heard from the 911 dispatcher. A hysterical woman on Sheep Hill Drive reported that she found her landscaper, Charley Hatch, lying on the ground at the north end of her property. He was shot in the face, and she thinks he’s dead.”

  41

  At twelve thirty on Tuesday afternoon, Henry Paley walked from his office to the Black Horse Tavern to meet Ted Cartwright, who had called and insisted they have lunch together. When he arrived, he glanced around the dining room, half-expecting to see either Detective Shelley or Ortiz at a table there. Over the weekend, both of them had separately stopped by the office to ask again about what Georgette had said to him that last evening. They’d been particularly interested to know if he had happened to figure ou
t what Georgette meant when Robin overheard her say, “I’ll never tell anyone that I recognized her.”

  I told them both that I have no idea who she recognized, Henry thought, and they both acted as if they didn’t believe me.

  As usual, most of the tables were occupied, but to his relief, Henry did not see either Shelley or Ortiz seated at any of them. Ted Cartwright was already at a corner table. He had chosen to sit facing the wall, but his white hair made him easy to spot. He’s probably halfway through his first scotch, Henry thought as he made his way across the room.

  “Do you think this meeting is a good idea, Ted?” he asked as he pulled out a chair and sat down.

  “Hello, Henry. To answer your question, yes, I happen to think it’s an excellent idea,” Cartwright said. “As the owner of twenty percent of the Route 24 property, you had every right to be in contact with someone interested in buying it. I could wish that you hadn’t put our bonus arrangement on paper for Georgette—and then the prosecutor—to find, but there’s nothing that can be done about that now.”

  “You sound a lot less upset about those notes that I kept than you did the other day,” Henry commented, then realized that the waiter was standing at his side. “A glass of Merlot, please,” he said.

  “Bring another one of these while you’re at it,” Cartwright told the waiter. Then, as the man reached for his glass, he added irritably, “I’m not finished with this one yet. Leave it alone.”

  He’s drinking fast even for him, Henry thought. He’s not as calm as he wants me to think he is.